The cult musical “Bat Boy” represents the best of what can happen when daring programming is put in capable hands.

With its morality-play heart and hipster brain, “Bat Boy” has the potential to be mawkish, heavy-handed and confusing.

But Littleton Town Hall Arts Center’s production directed by Nick Sugar is an edgy parable with a John Waters tone, cheeky dance numbers and excellent cast.

Sugar, who played the title role in 2004 for Theatre Group, and his cast manage the tricky tone of the script. Sugar and company show an appreciation for oddball characters, the same way Christopher Guest does in movies such as “Best in Show,” lightly washing them with heart — a sincere approach that gets tweaked up a notch by clever dialogue and silly and shocking situations.

“Bat Boy,” a musical based on a story that appeared in the 1990s in the Weekly World News tabloid, ran Off-Broadway in 2001. It tells the story of a half-boy, half-bat found in a cave in a West Virginia mining town by a group of teens.

Adopted by the family of Dr. Parker, the local vet, Bat Boy becomes a lightning rod among the rural folk, who consider the homely creature responsible for dead cows, dead kids and any other ills that befall them. They want the beast killed. But, as the cast exhorts, pointing fingers at the audience in the opening song: “Heed the tale of a filthy freak, who’s you . . . and you . . . and you.”

Think Hillary Clinton meets Kathleen Turner’s “Serial Mom,” and you have Meredith Parker, played by Margie Lamb. The vet’s wife wants to rescue Bat Boy, whom she names Edgar, countering the all-too-American attitude of the townspeople who want to “put him on display and charge admission.”

Her song with daughter Shelley and the town sheriff, Christian Charity, is wickedly sarcastic and a showcase of frenetic and yet seamless timing.

A live band (Donna Kolpan Debreceni, Larry Ziehl and Scott Alan Smith) sequestered in a cavelike aerie stage right provides immediacy and gives the dance numbers extra zip.

A role just as juicy as that of Bat Boy, Meredith Parker is the lynchpin whose need to save Edgar provides heart. Her attempts to get him up to speed in American culture provides a “My Fair Lady” moment.

In “Show You a Thing or Two,” Lamb and Lively, with help from Ellen Kaye, as Shelley, engage in more rapid-fire singing. Bat Boy travels from monosyllabic baby talker to a smartly dressed dandy with a fang-inflected British accent. But just as they say “Howdy, to a summa cum laude,” his dirty little secret — his bloodthirsty nature — reasserts itself.

The ensuing pathos — “Must I die then, with my nose still pressed against the glass?” — as he faces the town’s rejection, juxtaposed with his true nature culminates in a showstopper of a scene just before intermission that is luckily matched in power late in the musical as shocking secrets are exposed.

The cast of 10 seems incredibly comfortable with the format. Heather Larson proves especially watchable, while Cameron Stevens is hilarious in his dual role as stoner teen Rick and town busybody Lorraine. He and Hayley Wells pull off impressive onstage costume changes.

Set designer Tina Anderson takes advantage of the theater’s intimate space. She creates the world of nocturnal cold where Bat Boy was found that also quickly transforms into the suffocating home of the Parker family, as well as a woodland Studio 54 that features a rafter swing and a disco ball.

The young, energetic cast stayed committed despite the challenge of playing Off South Broadway to a senior matinee crowd. Nightime downtown crowds could make this show feel like an event.